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Spell Helper for the iPhone

31/01/2010
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The one thing that stops me from blogging from my iPhone more is that my spelling is atrocious. I usually need to write a bit in my wordpress app, save, exit, open my dictionary app, copy, close, open wordpress, paste… Or I just end up writing the whole post, save it as a draft, then do the final edit and proofing on my Mac later on — which somewhat defeats the convenience of blogging on the iPhone.

There are plenty of dictionary apps and spell checker apps, and plenty of text editor apps, but one app that is in short supply is a simple, low cost app that does both. Today I found Spell Helper by Takashi Wada, an app that let’s you write *or* paste an entire message inside the app and spell check the entire document.

By default it wants to send the corrected text to mail but you can also just go back to edit mode and select all and copy the message to any other app you choose. It would be nice if additional destinations could be predetermined similar to TextExpander — perhaps in later versions.

It would also be nice if there was a way to save a work in progress. At present, if someone were to call in while in the midst of writing this, then everything I’ve written up until this point would be lost.

And while I am nit-picking, it would be nice if compositions could be made in landscape mode. But aside from all this, this app is exactly what I have wanted; a quick and dirty place to write something and then have its spelling checked.

Are there better apps for this? Probably, and I will continue to test some out, but this was the first one I found that did what I needed without any other clutter.

Haven’t tried either one but would be interested in knowing what you think.

Next will be a grammar and punctuation checker — it would have found your “someone” when you meant “somewhat,” “it’s” when you meant “its” and “if there were” when you meant “if there was.” But you got to start somewhere, right? 🙂

Darn it! Honestly, I didn’t mean to add to your nit-picking! I couldn’t help myself. 😉